Normally scientists are a cautious lot and stick close to proven facts, keeping their personal opinions confined to small groups of friends, but when they know that there is a sign on a door that says "Classified Briefing in Progress," inhibitions collapse like the theories that explain all the UFO's away. People say just what they think.

I could jazz up this part of the UFO story as so many other historians of the UFO have and say that Dr. So-and-So believes that the reported flying saucers are from outer space or that Dr. Whositz is firmly convinced that Mars is inhabited. I talked to plenty of Dr. So-and-So's who believed that flying saucers were real and who were absolutely convinced that other planets or bodies in the universe were inhabited, but we were looking for proven facts and not just personal opinions.

However, some of the questions we asked the scientists had to be answered by personal opinions because the exact answers didn't exist. When such questions came up, about all we could do was to try to get the largest and most representative cross section of personal opinions upon which to base our decisions. In this category of questions probably the most frequently discussed was the possibility that other celestial bodies in the universe were populated with intelligent beings. The exact answer to this is that no one knows. But the consensus was that it wouldn't be at all surprising.

All the briefings we were giving added to our work load because UFO reports were still coming in in record amounts. The lack of newspaper publicity after the Washington sightings had had some effect because the number of reports dropped from nearly 500 in July to 175 in August, but this was still far above the normal average of twenty to thirty reports a month.

September 1952 started out with a rush, and for a while it looked as if UFO sightings were on the upswing again. For some reason, we never could determine why, we suddenly began to get reports from all over the southeastern United States. Every morning, for about a week or two, we'd have a half dozen or so new reports. Georgia and Alabama led the field. Many of the reports came from people in the vicinity of the then new super-hush-hush Atomic Energy Commission facility at Savannah River, Georgia. And many were coming from the port city of Mobile, Alabama. Our first thought, when the reports began to pour in, was that the newspapers in these areas were possibly stirring things up with scare stories, but our newspaper clipping service covered the majority of the southern papers, and although we kept looking for publicity, none showed

When the reports first began to come in, I had called the intelligence officers at all of the major military installations in the Southeast unsuccessfully trying to find out if they could shed any light on the cause of the sightings. One man, the man who was responsible for UFO reports made to Brookley AFB, just outside of Mobile, Alabama, took a dim view of all of the proceedings. "They're all nuts," he said.

About a week later his story changed. It seems that one night, about the fourth night in a row that UFO's had been reported near Mobile, this man and several of his assistants decided to try to see these famous UFO's; about 10:00P.M., the time that the UFO's were usually reported, they were gathered around the telephone in the man's office at Brookley AFB. Soon a report came in. The first question that the investigator who answered the phone asked was, "Can you still see it?"

The answer was "Yes," so the officer took off to see the UFO.

The same thing happened twice more, and two more officers left for different locations. The fourth time the phone rang the call was from the base radar station. They were picking up a UFO on radar, so the boss himself took off. He saw the UFO in air out over Mobile Bay and he saw the return of the UFO on the radarscope.

The next morning he called me at ATIC and for over an hour he told me what had happened. Never have I talked to four more ardent flying saucer believers.

We did quite a bit of work on the combination radar-visual sighting at Brookley. First of all, radar-visual sightings were the best type of UFO sightings we received. There are no explanations for how radar can pick up a UFO target that is being watched visually at the same time. Maybe I should have said there are no proven explanations on how this can happen, because, like everything else associated with the UFO, there was a theory. During the Washington National Sightings several people proposed the idea that the same temperature-inversion layer that was causing the radar beam to bend down and pick up a ground target was causing the target to appear to be in the air. They went on to say that we couldn't get a radar-visual sighting unless the ground target was a truck, car, house, or something else that was lighted and could be seen at a great distance. The second reason the Brookley AFB sighting was so interesting was that it knocked this theory cold.